Source: MSX Forum
Visitors of Event Eleven and readers of this topic on our active MSX Forum already know the true meaning of the mysterious Project Melancholia. The best MSX2 game ever is finally getting a proper English translation. While Hideo Kojima is best known for his successful Metal Gear saga, the best Kojima game for MSX arguably is not Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake or even Penguin Adventure, but the Super Deformed version of Snatcher.
In 1990 Konami released SD Snatcher. A cyberpunk action RPG exclusive to the MSX platform, seen by many as Konami and Kojima's goodbye gift to MSX. As most games at the time, the game was only available in Japanese. This did not stop MSX fans around the world to try and enjoy the game's music, graphics, gameplay and cutscenes by randomly running into every moving object until they progressed in the game. All that changed when a Dutch group, Oasis did something unprecedented at the time: they translated the game to English and released this translation as a patch. It was one of the first, if not the first, fan-translations of a commercially released game for any computer platform, and at least fhe first fan-translation of an MSX game.
However, limitations of their knowledge of Japanese, English and reverse engineering - as well as the absence of cross-development tools available - had their effects on the final result. There were mistranslations and, due to lack of space, only the tip of the iceberg was translated. Many, many, many details were lost in translation. Over the years, fans of the game started to realize this more and more - and several attempts were made to give the game a proper translation.
Now, 21 years after the release of the original game, finally a translation crew arose that properly took on the challenge: Max Iwamoto, Rieks Warendorp Torringa, René Lourens and Dennis Bakker. In order to facilitate the new translation, many changes to the game engine were made, such as support for 7-letter names (naturally, one should be able to spell Gillian Seed properly) and a new proportional font that improves readability and the amount of characters that can be used in a single screen.
During Event Eleven they first revealed their progress in this amazing trailer that completely blew the crowd away. Now, you can not only watch this trailer and several other in-game videos online, you can even download a demo version, which allows you to see the intro demos and play the game up to the part where you first meet Katrina. The Project Melancholia website furthermore offers a lot of background information on the translation crew, development progress and an interesting interview with Oasis.
The complete translation is expected to be released early 2012 and will cost € 12,50. People who pre-order the translation will receive a discount and will only have to pay € 10,-. Better yet, even when you decide to pre-order there is no need to pay upfront.
Relevant link: Project Melancholia (SD Snatcher retranslation)
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